I love poetry. It is only fitting that my fourth book of poetry, The Black Blood of Poetry, will be released this Valentine’s Day. Although this forthcoming selection, on its face, may not seem like “love poetry,” it is, because it embodies my love for the gifts of story and song that are the connective tissue within the souls of Black folk.

As Countee Cullen wrote:

Yet do I marvel at this curious thing:

To make a poet black, and bid him sing!

When I transport myself back in time in my mind, I hear those songs, protest songs, my people sang when I was born at the very beginning of the Decisive Decade, the 1960s. Those songs seeped into and took root in my soul, though they were probably already there and were simply awakened.

If you ask me what awakened the poet in my soul, who were my influences, I could not point to individual poets. I like to tell the story that my parents named me William because they knew I would be a poet. Some of my favorite poets are Williams – William Shakespeare, William Wordsworth, William Blake, and William Carlos Williams. The truth of the matter, though, is that the music and the history of the 1960s through the mid-1970s influenced all my writings, before I knew any of these Williams!

When I knew I was a writer, I knew that the genesis of my existence as a writer began the same year the great Richard Wright shuffled off his mortal coil. Through the collective unconscious, I experienced Wright’s death. Growing up, there was so much death around me. The milestones in my life were political assassinations. JFK, Malcolm X, MLK, and RFK, to name a few, all before I turned eight years of age! My earliest “political” memory, at 7 years old, is the assassination of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. I dreamt of cities burning, not realizing that they were actually burning. “Burn, baby, burn!” would become a refrain in many of my works. It wasn’t about the fire next time, the fire predicted – the world was on fire!

What better time to become a poet, forged through fire!